Category: spirituality

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ferdinand, in desperation at the terrible plight of ship and crew, cries out, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here!”

And looking around at our situation today, it wouldn’t be difficult to reach the same conclusion. Except that our modern materialistic science doesn’t allow for that conclusion. Oh, we might utter the words, but I doubt most of us would use words like “hell” and “devils” in anything more than an illustrative sense. We almost certainly wouldn’t mean them literally.

But there is a very modern science emerging here in Brazil that does consider the power of spiritual influence to inspire the human being – both for good or for evil. And yes, I do mean a science. And what the scientist responsible for this view, Dr. Norberto Keppe, maintains is that the evil is winning as long as we don’t have more consciousness of it. That means, reuniting theology and philosophy again with exact science, as used to be the case. So we can really understand our situation.

Today, public discourse is muted, and people lament the loss of the byproducts of virtue, like falling self-discipline and rising selfishness.

Not to mention the rampant corruption at all levels of modern society that makes us fear that virtue is, in fact, long gone. As a small indicator of this, a graph of the frequency of words occurring in books over time shows a rapid rise of the word “technology” in the past 40 years against a two-century slide in virtue.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

In the philosophy of religion, evil has always been a thorny issue. Is evil something inherent in the essence of man and nature? Or is it a willful act of ill-intentioned human beings?

And then there’s the whole confusion of natural disasters – the presence of which have even caused some thinkers to deny the existence of a perfectly good God. If hurricanes exist, this argument goes, perfect goodness doesn’t exist.

And I think it’s also safe to say that the theological concept of the existence of a being of evil as described in Judeo-Christian scripture is also controversial. A rebellion in heaven led by one of God’s brightest angels, Lucifer, is today treated mostly as allegorical or metaphorical – tales told to illustrate moral truth but not meant to be taken literally.

But in Norberto Keppe‘s deep science of Analytical Trilogy, spiritual influences in the myriad psycho-social crises we face today are considered. In fact, in Keppe’s experience, the spiritual component is more necessary.

Evil in the Modern World, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

A few hundred years ago, the notions of heaven and hell, of God and Lucifer, were respected themes for composers, poets, and painters. Milton’s Paradise Lost contains the idea of Lucifer endeavoring to defeat Christ and regain his former position in paradise. Raphael captured the epic battle where the Archangel Michael vanquished Satan. Beethoven wrote of the desire of man to know God.

And then, somewhere along the way, the devil became largely erased as a factor in popular culture. Any modern educated person who considers the battle between the forces of dark and the forces of light as anything but a mythical allegory is considered … well, not modern today.

But of course, it still persists. The rumors of rock stars making the Faustian bargain still abound, the Rolling Stones had dire repercussions to Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont, and many modern pageants have demonic idolatry built right into their ceremonies.

So I think it’s still relevant. Women and the Dark Side, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

A conscious planet … wow, is that ever needed right now. I know many people are feeling that something’s just not right in our world today, but don’t know how to characterize this general malaise they feel any more than that. Our program is trying to address that … indeed, Dr. Norberto Keppe‘s science of Analytical Trilogy has been shedding the light on what’s gone so wrong for over 50 years now. Either we’re slow learners, or we’ve really been avoiding the consciousness he brings.

So, no more avoiding. Understanding how humanity painted itself so tightly into this corner is here in our program today, along with some hope for a way out. Or at the very least, how to cope with the difficulties and offer a hand out to those in more serious need.

First in our program today, Susan Berkley with some thoughts on modern Judaism here shortly after the Jewish New Year, along with some thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. Then Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco with her perspectives from a lifetime career as a psychoanalyst on what’s gone so wrong, and how to fix it.

Consciousness for a Conscious Planet, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

Corruption. Some government official with his hand out or a doctor accepting an all expenses paid fishing trip in exchange for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or a baseball player betting on his own team. It’s part of doing business in some countries, and whispers of it are always present wherever big events, like the Olympics and the World Cup, are held.

But corruption is not reserved only for corporate boardrooms or secret meetings of the world’s power brokers – although it’s certainly in abundance there. It’s also inside all of us who corrupt ourselves without knowing how, or why.

We’ll look at corruption in all its forms today, on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

We have become inured to the huge levels of injustice and corruption perpetrated by our political/economic system today, and this needs to change. The current disturbing levels of apathy appear to be the reason for the success of Stéphane Hessel‘s Cry Out! – a French publishing phenomenon. This 13-page pamphlet encourages youth to recapture the French spirit of resistance by rejecting the “insolent, selfish” power of money and markets and by defending the social “values of modern democracy.”

Norberto Keppe‘s, Liberation of the People, written the the mid 1980s, offered a call to all idealists, all who believe in goodness, truth and beauty, to unite so a new society could be built, the Kingdom of Man on Earth. Keppe foreshadowed Hessel’s admonitions, and he goes deeper, too, explaining how we got so off track and offering concrete solutions to fix things.

We explore how that’s more than idealism and actually approaches true romance, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.